For soup: Melt butter in large pot over medium heat. Add onion and garlic and sauté until tender, about 10 minutes. Add broth, all squash and herbs; bring to boil. Reduce heat, cover and simmer until squash is very tender, about 20 minutes.

Working in batches, puree soup in blender. Return soup to same pot. Stir in cream and bring to simmer. Season with salt and pepper. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Chill. Rewarm over medium heat before serving.)

* If you are not confident in your knife skills or lack a very very sharp one, I’d suggest roasting the squash, halved and seeded, on a baking sheet coated lightly with oil at 425 until soft, scooping it into the pot, and cooking it the rest of the way there. Peeling, seeding and chopping raw squash is not the easiest endeavor. Alternatively, you could buy butternut squash already peeled and chopped in many stores. Haven’t seen acorn yet.

Oh my gosh this soup is amazing. The ginger and cumin really make it sing. I didn’t read down to the asterisk, so I chopped and peeled the acorn squash just with my knife. Yeah, please do the roasting method if you can’t find pre-peeled acorn squash. It’s tedious as hell to peel it by hand.

Next up:

Mini Greek Pizza Muffins

I originally got this recipe from my gym’s monthly newsletter, but they forgot to include the instructions! So I was left with a delicious-sounding list of ingredients and no knowledge on the cooking time/temperature. Thank goodness for Google, because I was able to track the recipe down from Eating Well.

Stir milk, feta, egg, tomato paste and olives into the onion mixture. Make a well in the dry ingredients; add the wet ingredients and stir until just combined. Fill the prepared muffin cups two-thirds full.

Bake the muffins until lightly browned, 13 to 15 minutes. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. Serve warm or at room temperature.

These are a perfect little snack and taste almost exactly like a bite of pizza! The texture is very light and fluffy, so you don’t feel weighed down at all.

Bonus Recipe! Spicy Roasted Squash Seeds

Oh please, you weren’t going to throw away those precious squash seeds, were you? They’re another amazing snack! And there’s a lot of freedom to season them however you’d like.

Start by preheating your oven to 275°F

Scoop the seeds out of your squash and remove all the stringy residue. Give them a quick rinse and pat dry

Put the seeds in a bowl, drizzle with a bit of olive oil (I used about a teaspoon for all the seeds in an acorn squash)

With the super long holiday weekend, I finally had some more time to do some cooking. I experimented with two new recipes this week, and have two more in the works. The first two I’ll share with you: Potato Cauliflower Mash and Potato Parsnip Chowder. Why so many potatoes? I could only find a 5lb bag of Yukon Golds, so I decided to run with it.